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Why is everyone suddenly making Google Reader replacements?
I get that Google Reader was probably a good service and whatever hole it left remains a void to be filled, but I am also seeing virtually no difference between one reader app and the next. The point of a news reader is to let you read and otherwise get out of the way and there are plenty that already do that. None of the last five Google Reader replacements to have made it to the front page of HN did anything more than that besides "having a clean UI."
The way all the Google Reader clones are suddenly popping up rather reminds of the accusations people are making right now about innovation, that instead of making anything new, people are building things like recipe sites and to-do list apps. [1] Which is not to say people should stop building RSS readers--people are entitled to work on whatever they're interested in--but why are people so fascinated by them?
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[1] I don't mean recipe sites or to-do list apps are necessarily useless. I used them as examples of high saturation, not of low utility.
- B-Con 13y ago1) Because it seems easy enough to make one. 2) Plus, there is a huge influx of users up for grabs. Even if you grab 0.5% of the Google Reader users, that's noticeable. 3) Everyone has their own opinion of exactly what "clean" means.
- akkartik 13y agoPeople are trying to replace something they spent hours with each day, and everybody who used it had some idiosyncracy he's now built into his muscle memory and just must have in a replacement. So you have a swarm of people scratching that itch, and a larger swarm of people looking to see if somebody might have built something that scratches their own little highly specific itch.
- marcelocamanho 13y agoChange is hard to accept when done by force. Also, killing Reader is kind of dumb, if you count all other "less useful" Google products that are still around.
- Concours 13y agoI guess it is a gold rush approach, some people are probably genuinely trying to offer an alternative to Google reader ,but I'm afraid the rest is just a gold rush issue
- kbudinoski 13y agoHere is a great Google reader replacement written down in Go programming language: http://www.goread.io/ http://www.goread.io/